Amarna toilets and other paraphernalia

Archaeoblog (Tony Cagle)

I’m slogging through The City of Akhenaten, Part II The North Suburb and The Desert Altars by Frankfort and Pendlebury (1933) for seasons 1926-32 at Amarna. Specifically, I’m looking for, well, descriptions of toilet and other sanitary facilities. Unfortunately for me, that means reading endless ruminations on the significance of colored plaster in nearly every room and detailed descriptions of rafter decorations and arrangements. Any mention of lavatory facilities is incidental and so I have to read everything to find them. Well, I’m also trying to get a feeling for how residences were structured in general, so it’s not a waste of time or anything.

Interesting stuff. They’re Brits so I had to recall that “bathrooms” were for bathing, not for. . .’evacuation’ purposes. The latter they tended to refer to as lavatories (oddly, in my view, since the ‘lavare’ root means ‘to wash’).